The Girl Green as Elderflower (12 page)

The brown girl went out, and the little fair girl who had been sitting beside her came further into the room.

‘Amabel,’ the lady said, ‘just step upstairs to the chaplain’s chamber and ask him if he would join us.’

The fair hair girl nodded and went away up the spiral stair.

‘Alicia, my love,’ remarked the Constable, ‘what an efficient Constable you are.’

‘Oh, pooh,’ said the lady. ‘If it takes a woman to see that Mr Clare is making himself look a perfect idiot, then it’s a good thing there’s a woman there.’

The brown girl came back in a hurry, and handed her mother a faded pair of blue jeans. On the fly was sewn a yellow patch, bearing the inscription: DOWN WITH PANTS.

‘Now, Lucy,’ the lady said, ‘you and I will turn our backs, and the gentleman will do what gentlemen do in the mornings.’

The lieutenant removed the cache-sexe of his cap, wondered what to do with it, and at length clapped it on his sandy head.

‘He seems very quiet and amiable,’ said the Constable. ‘Is there any point in having his hands bound?’

‘No, sir,’ said Reynold Fisher. ‘Just a precaution, like.’ Putting down his basket, he produced a knife from his pocket and cut the cord of the wild man’s wrists.

The youthful lieutenant looked doubtfully from the jeans to the wild man. As he foresaw, what lay ahead was a complicated manoeuvre, involving first lifting one of the man’s hairy legs, then the other. While this proceeded, the wild man had what looked like a fit of giggles, except that he made not the faintest sound.

At last he stood decorous before them, clothed from the navel like a Christian.

A quick step was heard on the spiral stair, and the chaplain entered, followed by Amabel. The chaplain was a big man, still youngish, black-clad and serious. But when the wild man looked at him, when he smiled in his brown beard, the chaplain smiled back with a fraternal condescension.

‘He like you padre,’ John said. ‘I can tell. Some people he don’t like one bit, but he like you and me.’

‘And who,’ asked the priest, ‘might he be? Some poor creature weak in his wits, no doubt.’

‘A wild man, padre,’ said the Constable. ‘Reynold Fisher caught him in the sea.’

‘A wild man,’ said the priest thoughtfully. ‘And in the sea. Now that raises an interesting question, or confusion. A wild man is properly a man of the woods, or in Latin
homo silvestris.
’

‘Silvester!’ exclaimed the lady. ‘But that of course, is what we must call him.’ She curtsied to the wild man. ‘Your servant, Master Silvester.’

‘He can’t be a man of the woods,’ the Constable said. ‘Reynold caught him three miles out. What
is
a wild man, anyway?’

‘A complex business,’ said the priest. ‘I myself would be inclined to say that a wild man is a person of weak intellect, possibly abandoned by his parents in some wild place as a child, and therefore growing up like an animal. It is not impossible that such a man should be a powerful swimmer, could literally swim like an otter. This man may have been such an abandoned child. I notice that he breathes air quite naturally. Did it seem to you that he could also breathe in the sea?’

‘I couldn’t properly say,’ said Reynold. ‘I thought he was swimming like a man, dint you, John?’

‘Couldn’t say, mate,’ said John. ‘I was too sick to see.’

‘Another possibility,’ continued the priest, ‘is that he is a malignant spirit inhabiting the body of a drowned man. We read of such a case in the Life of Saint Ouen.’

‘He int,’ said John indignantly.

‘Mind your manners, soldier,’ said Lieutenant Clare.

‘And yours, padre,’ said the lady. ‘I’ll not have you saying that our very pleasant-looking guest Silvester is some demon inside a corpse.’

‘There remains,’ said the chaplain, ‘the possibility that he is a merman. I must do some reading on that, but it seems the likeliest explanation.’

‘A merman!’ cried the girl Lucy. ‘Oh Marco—I mean, Mr Clare—would you sing us the ballad of the merman?’

‘I’m afraid, Miss Lucy,’ said the youth, ‘this is not quite the place. But at another time, with pleasure.’

Logs were burning in the great stone-hooded fireplace, but the three large windows were growing black. The merman began to glance at them repeatedly, with unease. He drew closer to John. At length he took John’s hand, and gazed into his eyes beseechingly.

‘You know what I think it is,’ John said. ‘I think he don’t like the dark. Do you suppose, sir, we could give him a place to kip?’

‘With no trouble at all,’ said the Constable, ‘but there is the matter of security. This man is potentially a devastating weapon against the King’s enemies. I’m afraid it will have to be the dungeon.’

‘With a brazier,’ the lieutenant said, ‘the dungeon could be made quite habitable. Not that the man seems to feel the cold. But somebody should probably stay there with him.’

‘Wish to volunteer, sir,’ said John.

‘Good show,’ said the Constable. ‘Organize a brazier, Mr Clare, and clean straw for both of them. Has the man eaten? Has anybody seen him eat?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Reynold Fisher. ‘He had a bite about eleven o’clock time. I’ve got his supper with me in here.’

He stooped to his basket, and took out a fine herring, which he gave to the wild man.

The wild man held it between his hands and crushed it. The juices dripped on to the stone floor. When the fish was a pulp, he wolfed it, bones, head and all.

‘I should say a merman, definitely,’ observed the priest.

Reynold offered another fish, and the merman dealt with it in the same way. A third was refused, with a shake of the head and a smile.

Amabel, who had not spoken until then, said in a precise little voice: ‘He has a very
nice
face.’ At her tone, the wild man turned and directed his smile towards her, white and warm.

‘Well, Silvester,’ said the lieutenant, diffident with the name, ‘I’ll conduct you to your quarters, and Private Westoft will see you settled.’

‘Goodnight, Silvester,’ said the gracious lady.

‘Goodnight, Silvester,’ echoed Lucy and Amabel.

The wild man hesitated. Then, awkwardly, he bent his head. It was almost a bow. He swung about, lithe and swift on his bare feet, and walked silently away after the lieutenant and John.

Later that evening the lady sat before the fire, her daughter on one side of her, her ward on the other. On a stool a few yards away sat the lieutenant, tuning his guitar.

‘Well, Miss Lucy,’ he said, ‘here is your request. The name of it is “Annis and the Merman”.’

Strumming chords, he began to sing, in a light true voice which sounded very young.

The dungeon was a pit, twelve feet square, twelve feet high. In the daytime it was lit by one narrow window, but that night there was only the glow from the brazier near the ladder leading to the floor above. It was close, damp and malodorous from the garderobe nearby, but for once it was warm, and the straw bedding was fresh and sweet.

As John rattled the poker in the brazier, a sharp small face looked down from overhead. The porcine eyes of Corporal Snart were on the wild man, who suddenly drew back, and going to the darkest corner, buried himself in straw.

Under a bristling nicotine-stained moustache, Snart bared yellow teeth. ‘So that’s him, is it? Seem to me he stink like a trawler.’

‘What you smell is piss,’ said John angrily, ‘from the fucking garderobe. He smell a fucking sight sweeter than some people I could name, and that int so very surprising, seeing he wash himself twenty-four hours a day.’

‘He don’t talk, they tell me,’ the corporal remarked.

‘No, he don’t,’ John said. ‘Pity that int infectious.’

‘I shan’t be surprised,’ said the corporal mysteriously, ‘if he do talk, one of these days.’

When the corporal was gone, John went and lay in the straw. From his shirt he produced a little box, and placed it between himself and the wild man. When he had turned a knob, it began to make music.

‘Thass a good radio, that,’ John said. ‘Got that cheap in Aden, I did, when I come home from Malaya.’

The wild man was enchanted, was rapt. The disc-jockey’s voice made him grin with delight. A look sentimental almost to tears was on his face as he listened to the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest.

‘Good old Luxembourg,’ John said. ‘Thass always there. But it’s lights out time, dear boy.’ He switched off the transistor and burrowed into the straw. ‘Goodnight, Silvester.’

Half an hour later, John’s snoring was stopped by the sound of Pearl Bailey. He rolled over, and found that the wild man had discovered the secret of the on-switch. He turned it off, took the wild man’s hand and slapped it. ‘Bad,’ he said, and went back to sleep.

Not long afterwards he was wakened again. A hand was pressing his hand, and pressing it to warm hairy flesh.

‘Oh Jesus, Silvester,’ cried John, ‘you int one of them, are you?’

But by the dim glow of the brazier he saw what it was. The wild man, who appeared to be clasping John’s hand tenderly to his cheek, was in fact listening to his wristwatch.

In the daytime, for the sake of his health, the wild man would be taken by John to one or other of the three turrets. From here they would look down on the church and village and the river with its boats; or over the marshes to the vague blue water and the misty loom of Orford Ness; or across the fields to the darkness of Tunstall forest. The wild man looked, saw everything, but showed nothing in his face.

He was taken to the chapel, a pretty room, only marred by the graffito of some bored or pious soldier, who had printed on the wall: SUDDEN PRAYERS MAKE GOD JUMP. In the chapel he showed no sign of reverence, ignoring the images, merely staring puzzled at head-bowings and genuflections. The chaplain, who had had thoughts of preparing him for baptism, abandoned them.

One night, while John was on guard in a turret and the wild man lay, as he always did as soon as night fell, in his straw, two clumsy figures climbed down a ladder into the dungeon. They were Corporal Snart and Robin, and both were drunk. They also chinked with hidden bottles, and Robin was carrying a rope.

The wild man sat up in the straw and watched them, grey-eyed. He did not look afraid, but to Corporal Snart he conveyed fear most intensely, and the corporal was gratified.

‘How do, Silvester,’ he said. ‘I believe the time has come for us to have a little conversation.’

The wild man began to leap up, but Robin bore him down on the straw. With the cord and a knife the corporal bound his wrists. Then he tied his ankles, and rose holding the long remnant of rope.

‘Give us a bunk-up, boy,’ he said. And when he was on Robin’s shoulders, he contrived to sling the rope over a hook in the vault.

The wild man was slowly hauled by his ankles from the straw. He hung upside-down, his trailing hair just brushing the stone floor.

‘So you don’t go in for talking,’ said the corporal, lighting a cigarette. ‘Well, thass very interesting, scientifically. For my peace of mind I should rather like to know what kind of noise a merman make.’

He approached his cigarette-end to the wild man’s armpit. There was a stench of hair, and then of burning flesh.

When Robin stooped to look at the wild man’s face, he saw that his teeth were set in a straight white grin.